EU Project Innowatech

In the same call of NEPTUNE the project INNOWATECH (Innovative and integrated technologies for the treatment of industrial wastewater) has been approved. Such a project, coordinated by Dr. Antoni Lopez from IRSA (Italy), is really complementary to NEPTUNE as it deals with innovative technologies for treating industrial wastewater.

In practice, the two projects together cover most of the problems associated with the treatment of industrial and municipal wastewater scheduling R&D activities aimed at identifying innovative, feasible and sustainable technological and/or methodological solutions.

Accordingly, a close cooperation between the two projects has been envisaged in order to avoid any overlap of similar activities as well as to disseminate the results of both projects among the interested groups of researchers, potential end uses and/or stakeholders that in most of the cases are the same. Furthermore, innovations developed in one project could result beneficial to the other.

On the base of the above considerations, in order to implement such cooperation, the following actions have been planned and jointly agreed:

• A representative of NEPTUNE (i.e., the coordinator or his deputy) will participate to key meetings (kick off-, middle term- and final term- meetings) of INNOWATECH and viceversa. If possible, such meetings will be organized and held jointly. Specialized conferences and/or workshops could be even organized jointly.

• As in the two projects both WP4 (“Tailor made solutions to end-users” and “Best practice evaluation”) are based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and basically have the same goals, the two WP4 leaders will closely cooperate trying to use the same methodologies and/or LCA models and/or tools in order to eventually "normalize" the outputs of both projects.

An important dissemination tool in both projects will be dedicated web sites designed to promote the dissemination and the exploitation of the results. The two web sites are intended as permanent tools capable of disseminating and exploiting not only the results of both projects but also their successive developments in the area of wastewater treatments. Developed innovations, research results and best practice procedures will be made available to interested subjects through these web sites.